Steroids

UNLIKE professional athletes who use anabolic steroids to improve their game, a 27-year-old mortgage broker in Orange County turned to "the juice" for reasons of pure vanity, "as simple as a looking-good thing." At the suggestion of a bodybuilder friend, he purchased a round of the drugs -- including oral and injectable steroids, as well as injectable human growth hormone -- for $1,000 in Mexico a few years ago. The drugs helped him buff up in just six months.

Unless Dr. Jamie Astaphan comes forward with a diary of his own, the mystery of Ben Johnson's positive drug test for the anabolic steroid, stanozolol, in the 1988 Olympic Games might never be solved. But the most plausible explanation to date emerged Thursday when sprinter Angella Taylor Issajenko suggested that Astaphan gave her, Johnson and other Canadian athletes stanozolol under false pretenses.

The doubters are everywhere. Never mind that Albert Pujols has never been publicly linked to anything stronger than cough syrup. You just don't do what he has done and escape suspicion. Not now. Not after Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz, Roger Clemens and a finger-wagging Rafael Palmeiro "He hits the ball a long way and they're going to say, 'Ah-ha, I wonder.' And it is unfair," Dodgers Manager Joe Torre said. "There's no question it's unfair." Never mind that the St. Louis Cardinals slugger has never failed a drug test since mandatory testing went into effect.

Twenty-five years later, it is hard to recall a time before the rumors and accusations. A time before athletes competed without suspicion hovering around each record-setting performance. A time before sprinters and swimmers had to share the sports page with the likes of nandrolone and stanozolol. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, it seems, were the last innocent Summer Games before the dawn of the steroid era.

Former Olympic track and field superstar Marion Jones pleaded guilty Friday to federal criminal charges that she lied to investigators about using steroids before her five-medal performance at the 2000 Summer Games in Sydney, and about her involvement in an unrelated New York-based counterfeit check scheme. The admission that she used steroids, made in U.S. District Court in White Plains, N.Y., represents a fall from grace for a woman who was once among the most celebrated athletes in the world.

First things first: I am not in favor of athletes doping with steroids. I am also not in favor of junk science, junkier legal procedure or, junkiest of all, emotion and hysteria driving intelligent thought out of the debate over performance enhancement in sports. Yet these are the central components of our national anti-doping policy. All of them are featured in the latest doping "scandal," the case of New York Yankee slugger Alex Rodriguez.

He once was a humble cyclist with a reputation for grit, whether riding with broken bones so painful that he ground 11 of his teeth to nubs or crying openly during the 2004 Tour de France when his beloved dog and constant companion Tugboat had to be put down. On Friday, Tyler Hamilton, 38, announced his retirement from cycling after failing a doping test for the second time in his career that included a dramatic stage win at the 2003 Tour de France and a gold medal at the 2004 Olympics.

A former Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy obsessed with bodybuilding was sentenced to more than five years in state prison after pleading guilty to robbing a Lake Forest jewelry store early this year. Timothy James Sladeck, 29, of Foothill Ranch was sentenced Wednesday after pleading guilty to two counts of armed robbery, one count of felony possession of steroids and a misdemeanor charge of possessing a hypodermic syringe.

No trace of the medicine HCG was found in Manny Ramirez's system at the time of his drug test, three sources with specific knowledge of the results have told The Times. It was a prescription for that drug, which is a non-steroid but banned by Major League Baseball, that led to the outfielder's 50-game suspension for violating the league's drug policy.

As the USC football team arrived for the start of training camp Wednesday morning, about a dozen players were told to report for drug testing at noon, their names selected at random. "Everyone knows we're getting tested at the end of the summer," offensive tackle Kyle Williams said. "They say [the selection] is done by computer, that they just press a button."

The bomb is dropped and the damage spreads. Mark McGwire admits he took steroids and family, friends and acquaintances are hit with the fallout. Also, former managers. This was going to be a fairly normal week in the off-season for Tony La Russa of the St. Louis Cardinals, McGwire's manager for all but a year and a half of his major league career. La Russa had a speech to make in Dallas early in the week for the benefit of his Animal Rescue Foundation and another for the same cause Sunday in St. Louis.

A recluse no more, Mark McGwire finally talked about the past, admitting what virtually everyone in baseball suspected for years, that he used steroids during his 16-year career, including the memorable 1998 season in which he and Sammy Sosa revitalized the game with their Great Home Run Chase. What Congress couldn't coax out of McGwire under oath in 2005, an impending return to baseball as the St. Louis Cardinals' hitting coach -- and the questions that would no doubt dog him in his return to the public eye -- could.

A federal appeals court appeared divided Thursday about whether key evidence in the Barry Bonds perjury prosecution should be kept from a jury. During a 30-minute hearing, a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals considered a government appeal of a pretrial ruling excluding evidence prosecutors said would show that the former San Francisco Giants slugger lied under oath when he said he never knowingly used banned substances. Two of the court's more liberal judges, Stephen Reinhardt and Mary M. Schroeder, asked questions skeptical of the prosecution, while Judge Carlos T. Bea, a conservative, challenged a lawyer for Bonds.

The federal government illegally seized confidential drug test results of dozens of Major League Baseball players and must now return the records, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday. "This was an obvious case of deliberate overreaching by the government in an effort to seize data" it was not entitled to have, Judge Alex Kozinski wrote for an 11-judge panel of the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals. During an investigation of illegal steroid sales by the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, a private lab in Northern California known as BALCO, the government sought the results of confidential drug tests of 10 players, including former San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds.

The doubters are everywhere. Never mind that Albert Pujols has never been publicly linked to anything stronger than cough syrup. You just don't do what he has done and escape suspicion. Not now. Not after Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, David Ortiz, Roger Clemens and a finger-wagging Rafael Palmeiro "He hits the ball a long way and they're going to say, 'Ah-ha, I wonder.' And it is unfair," Dodgers Manager Joe Torre said. "There's no question it's unfair." Never mind that the St. Louis Cardinals slugger has never failed a drug test since mandatory testing went into effect.

Twenty-five years later, it is hard to recall a time before the rumors and accusations. A time before athletes competed without suspicion hovering around each record-setting performance. A time before sprinters and swimmers had to share the sports page with the likes of nandrolone and stanozolol. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, it seems, were the last innocent Summer Games before the dawn of the steroid era.

Exactly one year ago, Manny Ramirez's arrival here left Los Angeles breathless. Today, lips pursed at another shameful revelation, those breaths are being held. Today, the celebratory thump-thump-thump has been replaced by an ominous tick-tick-tick. What in the name of chorionic gonadotropin is going to happen with this guy next? Is the taint that Ramirez and David Ortiz just brought to two of the most celebrated World Series titles in recent history going to spread to these Dodgers?

Manny Ramirez, you're not in San Diego anymore. Or are you? The Dodgers' left fielder sparked some boos Tuesday night during an abbreviated appearance, but he mostly generated indifference from a Citi Field crowd that displayed something resembling SoCal cool. The heckling was especially mild among those seated behind Ramirez in left field during the 4 1/2 innings he played before being ejected for scattering his bat, helmet and arm guard on the field after a called third strike.

Manny Ramirez returned to the majors this weekend, to the delight of Dodgers fans, following a 50-game suspension. Yet, when the news broke in early May that the Dodgers' star outfielder would be punished for violating Major League Baseball's drug policy, it was another slugger who called a news conference. Jose Canseco, best-selling author and baseball's steroidal sage, rented a big ballroom at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills and waited for the reporters and television crews to show up. But the news media already knew what Canseco was going to say, which was, essentially, "I told you so."

Who among us was taken aback by the news that Sammy Sosa used performance-enhancing drugs to fuel his bulked-up career? We'd already witnessed Sosa's flim-flam act before a congressional committee investigating steroids, his sudden inability to speak English after hard questions came.